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Wednesday, Apr 12, 2006, 8:04 pm

A Couple Noteworthy Items In The NY Times

Has Anybody Told George Bush Yet?
William Broad, Nazila Fathi and Joel Brinkley report that: "Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away."

Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions...
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The official, Muhammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran's atomic energy organization, said Iran would push quickly to put 54,000 centrifuges on line — a vast increase from the 164 they said Tuesday that they had used to enrich uranium to levels that could fuel a nuclear reactor.

Still, nuclear analysts called the claims exaggerated. They said nothing had changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States government has put that at 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020.
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"They're hyping it," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, a private group that monitors the Iranian nuclear program. "There's still a lot they have to do." Anthony H. Cordesman and Khalid R. al-Rodhan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington called the new Iranian claims "little more than vacuous political posturing" meant to promote Iranian nationalism and a global sense of atomic inevitability.
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Lots of Iran-bashing by various sources, all effectively undercutting the pretense of urgency. But no mention whatsoever in the article of the Bush administration's aggressive fear-mongering, conveniently timed to the approach of the November elections, in a blatant replay of the GOP's 2002 electoral strategy. Well, maybe they're just exposing one extremist megalomaniac at a time.
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Has Anybody Told Arlen Specter Yet?
Better a little late than never. John Markof and Scott Shane finally get around to reporting on the case of AT&T in cahoots with NSA illegal spying. The story is headlined: "Documents Show Link Between AT&T and Agency in Eavesdropping Case" A class-action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation accuses AT&T of helping the NSA invade AT&T's customers' privacy.

Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began to see what he thought were suspicious connections between that telecommunications giant and the National Security Agency.
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Now Mr. Klein and a few company documents he saved have emerged as key elements in a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T on Jan. 31 by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The suit accuses the company of helping the security agency invade its customers' privacy.
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Based on his observations and technical knowledge, Mr. Klein concluded that the equipment permitted "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of Internet traffic. Mr. Klein, 60, who retired in 2004 after 23 years with AT&T and lives near Oakland, Calif., said he decided to make his observations known because he believed the government's monitoring was violating Americans' civil liberties.